Theodorus HYRTACENUS
45. HYRTACENUS, a native probably not of Hyrtacus or Artacina in Crete, but of Artace, near Cyzicus, on the Propontis.
He lived in the time of the emperor Andronicus the elder, and occupied at Constantinople the office of superintendent of the public teachers of rhetoric and belles lettres.
Works
He was well acquainted with the works of the ancient poets, as is abundantly testified by his extant writings, which are full of quotations from them, though these are not always of the most appropriate kind. The diction of his address to the Virgin is a close imitation of the hymn of Callimachus to Diana; and in his panegyric on Saint Anna he has introduced the fable of Niobe.
Letters and orations
There are still extant by him ninety-three letters to different persons; a congratulatory address to the emperor Andronicus the elder, on his return to Constantinople; three funeral orations, one on the emperor Michael Palaeologus the younger, who died A. D. 1320, another on the empress Irene, the second wife of Andronicus the elder, and the third on Nicephorus Chumnus, the historical value of which is greatly impaired by their rhetorical style. They contain a plentiful sprinkling of biblical and Homeric passages.
Other works preserved in MSS.
His panegyric on the Virgin Mary, his oratorical description of the garden of Saint Anna near Nazareth, and a panegyric on Aninas Thaumaturgus, are still in MS.
Editions
His letters were published by Laporte du Theil, in the Notices et Extraits des Manuscrits de la Bibl. du Roi, vol. v. p. 709, &c., vol. vi. p. 1. The four orations are printed in Boissonade's Anecdota Graeca, vol. i. p. 248-292.
Further Information
Fabric. Bibl. Graec. vol. x. p. 397; Schöll, Geschichte der Griech. Lit. vol. iii. p. 151.
From William Smith (ed.), Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Text provided under a CC BY-SA license by Perseus Digital Library, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tufts University. Data accessed from https://github.com/PerseusDL/canonical-pdlrefwk/ on 17 October 2026.